Every World Cup propels a breakout star into the firmament; this year’s might just be a seemingly random German soccer fan who goes by Freddy. In the World Cup’s opening week, his X posts extolling a Taco Bell as “the holy land” and chronicling his rapturous 1 a.m. visits to a Waffle House and a Buc-ee’s have attracted more attention—from Americans, at least—than most of the actual matches.

Freddy from Germany is the standard-bearer of an emergent social-media genre: A World Cup visitor from overseas encounters American culture and excess—and loves it. The Spanish soccer wunderkind Lamine Yamal loaded up a grocery cart at a Walmart in Georgia. “Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack?” a Swedish fan posted on X from an Indiana diner. “EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.” A Japanese man raved about Texas Roadhouse steak. Freddy’s Buc-ee’s post showed customers flowing into the cavernous convenience store, its cartoon-beaver logo a towering beacon that illuminated the night sky. In another photo, a row of pumps stretched, like a horizon, beyond both sides of the frame. Freddy was overawed: “DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION😭😭😭,” he wrote.

Americans, of course, are eating it up with a spork. “This is genuinely making me patriotic,” one wrote of a video showing a rotund New Jersey–deli guy dancing with a visitor from London and giving him a chicken-parm sandwich on the house. Another observed: “It’s sick to see how many Europeans came over here to actually enjoy US culture. Saw a guy look at a Buc-ee’s gas station the same way I’d look at Stonehenge.” The caption on a video of an Italian’s astonished reaction to unlimited soda refills captured the half-winking exceptionalism in a familiar meme: “The European mind cannot comprehend this.”

The videos have been covered in the media as a refreshing antidote to our polarized political moment and as an indication that American greatness resides at least partly in conveniences we take for granted. It’s a nice thought. But not all of the videos, or the people behind them, are quite what they seem.

Take the Swedish soccer fan who swooned over ranch dressing. Elsa Thora, a photogenic 24-year-old blonde, has been featured in a number of news stories about foreign soccer fans’ American exploits, exuding a gee-whiz gusto for the country’s food and culture. “I feel like I’m in a movie,” she posted, holding bags of Hostess Twinkies and cheese-stuffed Combos outside a convenience store. “OK so Amish people are real,” she marveled.

What many of the news stories have failed to mention is that Thora is not new to the social-media spotlight. She’s a star on the adult platform OnlyFans and a fixture in the British tabloids, where she’s made headlines for expressing her desire to have sex in space, to birth Elon Musk’s first baby on Mars, and to sleep with a player from every English Premier League soccer club. (“Three down, 17 to go,” she told The Irish Sun in 2024.) She already has some 388,000 followers on Instagram. When I reached her by phone, on her way to Los Angeles, she told me that she works in digital marketing but that the trip to the States was just for fun and the love of soccer. She acknowledged that her posts here have raised her social-media profile but insisted that she isn’t trying to monetize them: Her enthusiasm for American culture is genuine, she said.

Thora may have more to gain from gushing than an ordinary soccer fan, but at least she’s a real person who’s really here for the World Cup. The same cannot be said for Nobunaga, a user whose viral X post purports to recount a Japanese visitor’s experiences at an American hibachi restaurant. “I witnessed a ritual I have never seen in eight hundred years of being Japanese,” begins a deadpan story that goes on to describe the chef building a flaming volcano of onion rings and hurling a shrimp through the air for the narrator to catch with his mouth.

The post is part of a series in which Nobunaga takes on the persona of a samurai traveling around the world and into space. (The account shares a name with Oda Nobunaga, a powerful 16th-century samurai.) Running the posts through Pangram, an AI-detection tool, yields a consistent verdict of “100% AI.” Nobunaga told me via X message that the aim of the stories is comedy, not “realism, journalism, or persuasion.” But at least in the context of the World Cup, some of the account’s audience seems to have taken its American-restaurant reviews at face value. “I am enjoying your posts with enthusiasm and a few tears,” a woman, whose X bio identifies her as a Trump supporter and patriot, replied to the hibachi post.

Between the influencers and the AI-slop accounts lies a spectrum of inauthenticity. The New Jersey–deli guy, for instance, is real, but the Parkwood Deli’s 400,000-follower Instagram account suggests that the shop is canny about marketing his old-school charm. And in fact, the deli first posted the clip of his interaction with the London couple on Instagram in April, which suggests it had nothing to do with the World Cup, despite its current popularity. (Parkwood Deli did not respond to my request for comment.)

Also real is the Japanese man who praised Texas Roadhouse for its steak. The account’s owner, who told me his name is Keisuke Yamanaka, really does enjoy Texas Roadhouse, and he isn’t a professional influencer. But he also isn’t in the United States for the World Cup, and the image he posted wasn’t his own, he acknowledged. “To be completely honest, when I posted the tweet, I never imagined it would reach millions of people,” Yamanaka said. “I simply wanted to share a restaurant recommendation with Japanese fans traveling to the United States for the World Cup.”

Then there’s Freddy. A month ago, he had an unremarkable social-media presence, posting almost exclusively in support of the legendary Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo. An April post on X about his upcoming trip to the World Cup in the United States got a modest 60 likes. Then he landed in Atlanta, his starting point for a road trip to Houston with his unnamed companions, and his profile achieved liftoff. He snapped those pictures of the Taco Bell and got 48,000 likes. On June 8, he bestowed a 10/10 rating on his Waffle House visit—109,000 likes. And then, on June 10, the Buc-ee’s blockbuster: 305,000 likes, more than 25 million views.

Suddenly Freddy was a rock star. He started taking requests for places to visit next. He hit up a Bass Pro Shops that he said had a shooting range inside it. By June 12, he was fending off fake Freddies who had sprung up on Instagram and TikTok to try to cash in on his newfound fame. In New Orleans, he was given free tours of the Saints and Pelicans facilities. A sign on the highway at the Louisiana border reads Welcome to Louisiana; below it was a hand-painted banner: Welcome Freddy. In Houston, Freddy hype took on a life of its own. The police department posed with him for a photo op. The mayor met him at an Astros game. The American-football star J. J. Watt bought him a lavish hotel stay and a care package full of swag. By Tuesday, he was at NASA’s Johnson Space Center getting a personal tour of the Orion capsule from the astronaut Anne McClain. Freddy did not take a time-out from the ride of his life to respond to my request for comment.

Posts like Freddy’s and Thora’s tell a story that’s flattering to Americans—that unfettered consumerism has gotten a bad rap; that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is such a thing as American culture; that it deserves celebration, even adoration. But telling people what they want to hear is exactly what today’s attention economy is designed to do. Algorithms don’t guarantee that those posts will reflect reality. As long as the demand for the content is genuine, the supply doesn’t have to be.

No doubt at least some of the mutual enthusiasm between Americans and visiting football fans is sincere. Bostonians joined Scotland’s “Tartan Army” as it marched through their city, blaring bagpipes and drinking its pubs dry. Philadelphians embraced a crowd of raucous Ecuadorans who draped their national team’s yellow jersey over the city’s beloved Rocky statue (a classic blunder, as it turns out). It’s probably not a coincidence that so much American hospitality has been showered on Freddy, the character whose story feels the closest to authentic of the bunch. I verified with spokespeople for both the Houston police and mayor’s office that his interactions with them really happened.

Yet even Freddy is keeping close control of his own story and has studiously stayed anonymous, at least to online fans. He has been careful not to show his face in any of his posts and has not disclosed his real name. Whatever his initial intentions for posting through his World Cup trip, his great American adventure has gathered a momentum that professional influencers dream of. When Freddy found the care package from Watt in his hotel room, he was moved. “This is all so insane... I genuinely don’t understand how it got to this point,” he posted. “We’re just normal World Cup tourists.😭😭” If that was ever true, it isn’t anymore.

Every knowledge-based profession may one day reach the point when AI outperforms the human experts. In medicine, that day appeared to come in April. A group of primarily Harvard and Stanford researchers announced the results of a study that pitted ChatGPT against hundreds of physicians in a diagnostic obstacle course involving written medical mysteries and information from real-world patients. The bot had won, and the humans weren’t entirely happy about it.

“I get a little bit queasy about how some of these results might be used,” Adam Rodman, a lead author on the study, said at a press conference just ahead of its publication in the journal Science. The work had amounted to an academic exercise, he told reporters; as thorough as it may have been, it did not prove that ChatGPT or any other AI tool was ready to become a standard part of medical practice. His caution was in line with that of other experts, yet as Rodman knew, most people will ignore the warning. AI has already wormed its way into the U.S. health-care system, evidence and safeguards be damned.

Even as I was watching Rodman’s press conference, I got a message on my phone from the administrators at the medical center where I work as a pathologist. They’d emailed me to say that an “AI-powered clinical reasoning tool” was now available for me to use. This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this sort of email; it wasn’t the second or third time either. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many generative-AI products have been rolled out to us in recent years, none of which has been approved for medical use by the FDA.

This enthusiasm feels unprecedented. Health care is typically among the last fields to adopt a new technology; I still use a pager, and I send faxes on a regular basis. (Younger readers can ask Claude to explain what these things are.) A tendency toward simple tech is in part a product of doctors’ safety-focused culture: We know that any ill-timed glitch has the potential to turn deadly. But these days, clinicians are allowed—encouraged, even—to run wild with the latest software, guided by a generic warning that “AI can make mistakes.”

Those mistakes can be consequential. Although Rodman’s research shows that generative AI can help diagnose rare diseases or make sense of unusual symptoms, a randomized trial that was published in NEJM AI just the week before found that intentionally erroneous output from an AI model can easily lead doctors astray. Nonprofessionals could be similarly misled. A recent study by Oxford scientists found that using AI did not significantly improve patients’ ability to diagnose themselves or others. Another one, led by researchers at Mount Sinai, suggested that chatbots may fail to alert users to potential medical emergencies.

[Read: Drink whole milk, eat red meat, and use ChatGPT]

Misdiagnosis is not the only concern. As AI permeates the health-care system, errors are cropping up in unexpected places. When I spoke with Rodman by phone after his press conference, he told me that he’d been surprised one day to find that his hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, had enlisted AI to draft messages to patients on his behalf—sometimes producing output for his review that he described as “completely absurd.” (Sarah Finlaw, a spokesperson for Beth Israel Lahey Health, told me that use of AI tools is voluntary and subject to hospital training and support. She also said that any output from AI tools must be approved by a physician.)

Part of the problem is that health-related AI products can be deployed without any vetting by officials at the FDA. If a software package that is intended for physicians is classified as a “clinical decision support tool,” and not a medical device, it usually avoids the agency’s oversight. To be counted in this category, an AI-powered app generally must rely on the existing medical literature, avoid analyzing medical scans or images, explain its reasoning, and leave diagnosis and treatment up to a physician.  Most of the generative-AI products that doctors use today seem to meet these criteria.

Consumer-wellness apps and devices may also bypass FDA review so long as they are intended for “maintaining or encouraging a healthy lifestyle” and not for diagnosing or treating specific conditions. With this in mind, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI all warn users that their health-related chatbots are not meant to provide medical care or issue diagnosis and treatment recommendations. In practice, though, the distinction isn’t always clear. Elon Musk encourages people to use his Grok chatbot to generate second medical opinions and interpretations of their X-ray and MRI images; a marketing video for ChatGPT Health shows the app reassuring people that their lab results are in a healthy range and encouraging them to continue taking cholesterol medication.

Most of these apps also invite users to connect their medical records and wearable health devices. AI companies wouldn’t need to gobble up all of these data just to offer generic health information. A new product from the medical start-up Hims & Hers, called Labs AI, goes so far as to help interpret the results from “up to 130 biomarker tests” for its users and then provide a “deep, personalized, and actionable analysis on whole body health, risks, and patterns.” I, too, analyze a patient’s lab results and then give personalized, actionable advice. What’s the difference?

When I reached out to the makers of these products, they reaffirmed that no actual medical advice is being given out to users. Dominic King, the vice president of health at Microsoft AI, told me in an emailed statement that its Copilot app provides “helpful information and support for conversations with clinicians” and not “a single, firm diagnosis.” Patrick Carroll, the chief medical officer of Hims & Hers, told me that Labs AI does not diagnose or recommend treatment: “That responsibility belongs to clinicians, and Labs is designed to reinforce that boundary.” Anthropic and xAI did not respond to my inquiries. OpenAI declined to comment for this article.

Perhaps that boundary—between doctor and algorithm—is somewhat artificial to begin with. One idea kicking around the medical literature is to stop treating AI products as if they were merely standard medical devices. Given their humanlike ability to learn new information and tailor answers to individual patients, medical AIs may function more like doctors than defibrillators—so perhaps they should be evaluated in the same way that physicians are. Instead of requiring FDA approval for each and every function it can perform, a chatbot might be asked to pass a medical-licensing exam and undergo a period of supervision akin to a medical residency.

[Read: The ChatGPT symptom spiral]

For the moment, though, that idea remains on the fringe. Haider Warraich, a cardiologist and program manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, the U.S. government’s program for developing advanced health technology, is leading a major effort to get medical chatbots approved in the traditional way. His agency is providing funding for the development of an AI tool that is tailor-made for heart conditions, and then to send it through a full FDA-authorization process. Warraich’s hope is that by undergoing such a rigorous evaluation, the chatbot will be able to safely evaluate and treat patients without the involvement of a doctor. Rodman praised this approach but warned that the process is going to take years, during which time a plethora of new health AIs will have slipped into the market with little scrutiny.

In this way, the emergence of today’s AI health products remind me of the rise, in the 2010s, of ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft. The taxi industry is heavily regulated, making it difficult for new players to enter the market. Yet by skirting and at times ignoring those rules, ride-sharing companies were able to acquire a critical mass of users in a short period of time. Pretty soon, governments had little choice but to adjust their laws to match what had by then become the status quo. The same pattern could end up playing out in medicine. Will regulations meant to ensure that medical products are safe and effective remain in force? Or will they instead be weakened or removed to clear the path for tools that everyone is already using?

We’ll soon find out. The health-care system is not going to “slow down and wait for the evidence to accrue,” Rodman told me. Eighty percent of doctors are already using AI tools in their job, according to a 2026 survey by the American Medical Association. Patients aren’t far behind. The benefits of AI may remain uncertain, but they’re already too enticing to pass up.